The Fall of Football

Football does not run deep in my family’s blood. Our household religions growing up were Baptism and Baseball, in roughly that order. Pastor Bob Lott—aka “Dad”— was a high-school baseball player turned youth minister and amateur sports nut. His boys’ earliest memories are of swinging plastic bats at wiffle balls in the yard, going out for tee-ball and Little League, and chasing other kids under the bleachers and around the batting cages during the adult church league Monday night softball games in Tacoma, Washington.

Dad played football in high school for one year only, a fact he rarely advertised. Only one of the three brothers Lott went out for football. He quickly lost interest after he hit another kid a little too hard and caused a minor, easily healed break to the boy’s arm. Not so many years ago, you could have said that I didn’t have a dog in the fight outlined in popular historian Daniel J. Flynn’s The War on Football. What changed was that I started watching football and came to appreciate the strategy, discipline, drama, and sheer brutal beauty of the game.

Watching was practically unavoidable. While I lived in D.C., a friend had season tickets to the Redskins and dragged me along to games. Another friend, a roommate from Flynn’s native Massachusetts, worshiped God at his Methodist Church on Sunday morning and on Sunday nights venerated the New England Patriots in our living room or local sports bars. I moved back to Washington state just in time for the Seahawks to get good under gum-chewing dynamo coach Pete Carroll and was surrounded by fantasy leaguers, season ticket-holding diehards, and tens of thousands of new fair-weather fans.

When Flynn says football is America’s game, he doesn’t have to make a statistical case to convince us. Even diehard baseball bigots who think that theirs is a true gentlemen’s contest—the recent steroid-fueled home run derby notwithstanding—and that football is barbaric know Flynn’s right. Football dominates our kids’ sports, our high schools, our colleges, our televisions, our bars, even our bedrooms—women complain of being “football widowed” by their fanatical fan husbands.

Flynn sees football’s current dominance as a win for civilization, not barbarism. “Football is good for you,” he writes. “Football brings a divided America together. It channels the natural aggression of testosterone-filled teenagers in a positive direction.” Moreover, it teaches life lessons:

Players succeed by transcending pain rather than brooding on it. Game day results come through hard work during practice and the offseason. No team can show up unprepared and expect victory. Competitors aren’t social atoms but part of something greater. Rules limit conduct; consequences await transgressors. Authorities—coaches, captains, referees—foster obedience, listening, learning, humility, and discipline.

File all that under “nice while it lasted,” according to Flynn’s own dire predictions. He argues American football has peaked. It should be expected to undergo steep and irreversible decline, not for demographic reasons but for cultural ones. Americans are softer than they used to be, both physically and emotionally, he explains. American youth are fatter. Their parents tend to be either under-involved, in the case of many single-parent or poor families, or way too involved in trying to secure special opportunities, privileges, and exemptions for their children with an eye toward rigging the kids’ futures.

So-called helicopter parents take their cues from whatever they can grab hold of in the more respectable parts of popular culture, and the NPR set emphasize the dangers of football. Malcolm Gladwell blinked and decided we should abolish the game. President Barack Obama said that if he had a son, he would have to think good and hard about whether to let him play football. Talking heads regularly go on about how brutal the game is on players, often likening football to smoking. Several city councilors and school board members have proposed abolishing the game altogether for kids. They have not yet enjoyed much success, but overprotective parents all over the country have begun to keep their children out of this potentially debilitating sport.

This is a contrarian book and an honest one. It is at times brutally frank in its acknowledgment of how many males have been hurt, maimed, or killed on the gridiron. It asks us to see the broader picture of all the good football does—while at the same time showing why the good is so often obscured. Football is now safer than ever before, Flynn argues with evidence. He compares it favorably to many other popular sports, including baseball and hockey, in which small, dense projectiles regularly hurl toward players’ heads and other body parts at high speeds. He thinks much of the outrage directed at football is based on flawed studies and trumped up claims by trial lawyers who stand to make an awful lot of money from our bad impression of the game. He doubts that even a nation as football-obsessed as America has what it takes to resist the onslaught.

Flynn is a temperamental declinist. This can lead him to exaggerate problems, but it also allows him to see earlier and more clearly when things really are going badly. I resisted his jeremiads in a previous work, Blue Collar Intellectuals, while admiring everything else about it—the research, the writing, the choice of subjects. Yet this time with The War on Football Flynn seems to have struck true.

On a recent Saturday night, I went to CenturyLink Field, where the Seahawks usually play football, but instead I saw a snapshot of things to come. I have seen the future of American sports, and it has a whole lot less upper body strength. It still has plenty of running and passing and kicking, but is extremely low-scoring. Teams can rise to dominance just by running up a great number of tie games. The fans are even more emotional than football fans, often chanting “Let him die!” when the player from an opposing team falls on the field and the refs see to him. The sport is soccer, and we may well be doomed.

To do The War on Football justice, I have refrained from commenting on the media controversy that threatened to swallow the book in the month of its release. Yet it would be unjust to readers to leave it out, so here are the facts. Publicists for Flynn’s book had pitched the Wall Street Journal’s Weekend Review the idea of an essay based on the book. Editors at the Journal said send it over. This Flynn did. After some internal debate at the paper, it passed on the piece. Flynn placed a version of the rejected article in the sister News Corp. tabloid the New York Post instead.

The Journal then published the essay “In Defense of Football” by writer Max Boot the day before the Post ran Flynn’s piece by the same title. Because of the newspapers’ different online posting schedules, the stories appeared only hours apart. Upon reading the rival piece, Flynn decided the title wasn’t all the Journal had made off with. “For five straight paragraphs,” Flynn wrote in his weekly pop-culture column for The American Spectator’s website, “Boot’s piece relies on the same examples I used in my submission. Beyond this, Boot uses these identical examples in the precise order I had employed in my piece considered by editor Gary Rosen almost three weeks earlier.” Elsewhere, Flynn lamented that he had spent “most of my summer unwittingly serving as an unpaid researcher” for a rival writer.

Flynn pressed his case at length. He argued that his coming forward had nothing to do with sour grapes and everything to do with justice and with preemptively heading off charges of plagiarism because the Journal had put him “in a terrible position. To some, it would seem as though I had cribbed from Boot’s piece rather than the reverse.”

For his part, Boot threatened to sue the newspaper Politico if it printed Flynn’s “scurrilous and unsubstantiated allegations.” The paper ran with those accusations. From a trail of e-mails, reporters Dylan Byers and Hadas Gold pieced together a damning story: the Journal had rejected the work of an author about to have a book out; approached another writer, Boot, who was off all the way in Thailand, offering him $4,000 for 2,000 words and plenty of editorial help, to produce a piece making the same basic point as Flynn; and released the Boot piece at the same time as Flynn would be launching his book without so much as a name-check. The reporters didn’t definitively establish whether Boot got a look at Flynn’s work to crib from it. They proved he knew of its existence and some of its arguments.

Flynn agonized before coming forward because he understood that the arguments are what matter most. If football is to have a future, the game will have to be defended more fiercely than the Carolina Panthers guard QB Cam Newton. The War on Football gives the cultural defensive line a fighting chance.

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America’s sport? Never in 50-odd years, various parts of six states, and two years at a famous football school have I seen anyone over eighteen playing football who wasn’t being paid or otherwise significantly compensated for it. Tossing a ball, yes, and maybe running and making a few breaks and dodges. But not playing the actual game. Even with people under eighteen, it seems to be usually played because it is mandatory. Voluntary games of tackle football are even rarer. I’ve walked past dozens or hundreds of games in a nearby town park–all baseball, soccer, or hockey. Never football, even touch football. From my own youth, I remember lots of enthusiastically voluntary hockey games, not to mention baseball, basketball, and handball, but football wasn’t much seen outside of phys ed class or Boy Scouts. Many things have changed since then, but it doesn’t look like voluntary participation in actual football is one of them. If helicopter moms are a factor in the supposed decline of football, they don’t seem to mind hockey.

Football fans don’t play football. They sit on a couch. Football is strictly a sport for TV, and now computer gaming. Even stadium events, where at least the couch is left behind, are a relatively small fraction of the market, though uniquely annoying as far as the pro game goes. (I live in Minnesota, where the New Jersey Vikings just obtained half a billion dollars from the state by flagrantly illegal means. Football is hardly in danger here.) If football is a valuable American social and cultural phenomenon, then so are a lot of other things that are sucked through the glass teat. As for its connection with athletics and skill, I don’t see that a sport which, in its most popular form, couldn’t exist without massive drugging (some of which is against the rules) and frequent surgery, has anything real to teach us–unless rule-breaking, loud acting out of fantasies, seven-day-a-week Monday-morning quarterbacking, and strictly vicarious participation in activities that involve (artificially enhanced) skill and strength, count as life lessons.

I hardly see any decline in football as the media and fantasy phenomenon it is. It’s possible that participation in the actual game might be declining in secondary schools without my noticing it, but if its future is so dependent on secondary-school participation, what claim does it have to be America’s sport? What hasn’t changed is that football as a major cultural phenomenon is loud, unscrupulous, and always wants more money.

For 50 years the three “Ns” have symbolized American greatness: NASA, the Nimitz and the NFL. NASA is a shell of its former self and the Nimitz seems to be vulnerable to missile and submarine attack. And now the NFL has peaked. We are doomed.

There is literally nothing Flynn lists under football’s exclusive merits that is in the least bit exclusive to football. For most of its early history it was a campus cult, practiced by a minority of the overall tiny elite minority of university-educated Americans. Widespread CTE might explain a lot about the behavior of our power structure ever since.

Frankly, I’m not convinced this isn’t like mourning the end of a tragic fad, bloodthirsty disco or something.

For 50 years the three “Ns” have symbolized American greatness: NASA, the Nimitz and the NFL.

I may agree with first two, but how NFL is a symbol of American greatness? Who, beside inside US, really cared? National greatness is symbolized by the things which resonate globally. Globally, NFL not even close to UEFA Champions League, let alone FIFA World Cups. Just as an example–Italian greatness is symbolized, among many national symbols, by Squadra Azzurra. Whole world (and I do not exaggerate) knew and know names of Alessandro Del Piero, GiGi Buffon and still remembers Paolo Rossi or Dino Zoff. If you want to really point out American symbols in terms of sports it is not NFL but NBA. In basketball, United States unequivocally proved its superiority on international arena against the best of the best. And..and..the whole world, indeed, plays basketball.

If it really is “America’s game” (talk about grating self-congratulation!), how come the trade association representing always needs to fleece local communities for its stadiums? Shouldn’t “America’s game” be able to stand on its own feet?

We can only hope that football (as the rest of the world calls it) replaces American football. Can anyone doubt that soccer players are better, healthier all-round athletes than the circus freaks populating “America’s game”?

The trouble with a lot of what falls under the umbrella of “cultural conservatism” is that grand projections are made with respect to consequences of free choice. That, and the projection du jour is nailed to the cathedral door as the latest concern about which One Must Care. So Mr. Flynn, Mr. Boot and other guardians of our national manhood proceed from the assumption that the diminishing interest in actually playing football (as opposed to watching it) must result from a conspiracy of elites guided from a conference room somewhere in the basement of, say, the Modern Language Association. Decisions of individual parents to nudge their children toward soccer rather than football are coded up as evidence of a decline in national purpose. The fact that NBC now broadcasts Premiere League matches on Saturday mornings is yet further evidence of the tentacles of an effete cabal, almost assuredly originating from a gathering of radical feminists somewhere.

How this explanation squares with the exploding popularity of a sport as combative as lacrosse is left unanswered.

Maybe the ascendancy of football since World War II to the distinction of our current “national pastime” is abating – though no one will be able to tell from the ratings of this weekend’s Super Bowl (which I plan to watch). Maybe such phenomena have a life cycle that is due to little more than gradual shifts in tastes. Right now – or so it seems – many more children participate in soccer, or basketball (why does no one ever mention basketball in these discussions?) than in football – or baseball, for that matter. Is this a result of a radical cultural shift, or simply the marketplace at work? Football, and the task of equipping teams and players for football, has become quite expensive, through the brute reality of tort law. Yes, that reality is influencing school budgets and in doing so, diminishing the number of future Seattle Seahawks and Denver Broncos in the developmental pipeline. It’s as much an economic phenomenon as it is a cultural phenomenon – but to suggest (as Mr. Flynn and Mr. Boot have) that it’s likewise a moral phenomenon is to project one’s tastes to an high level of overreach.

We should be concerned that too many young people are sitting on their sofa playing with the latest electronic devices.We should probably be concerned that a cultural trend of over-protection and over-orchestration of children’s lives may be resulting in fewer pick-up games of any sport. But it should be a source of encouragement that plenty of people enlist in the Marines who once played soccer as children. And I hope Mr. Flynn, Mr. Boot and others who share their fears will take comfort in the fact that there is every indication Sunday’s Super Bowl will provide the biggest TV draw of the ratings season.

To qualify as “America’s Game”, it would have to have some kind of populist appeal for non-professionals. In that sense, baseball and basketball are the clear winners. Calling football America’s game is like calling filmmaking “America’s Art” or broadway musicals “America’s performance.” Just because we enjoy watching something doesn’t mean we care about doing it ourselves.

Football was a trend. Trends come and go. Many years ago there was an article profiling the quarterback of the Harvard football team, reflecting on how the would-be “Big Man on Campus” was just another semi-anonymous student who played a varsity sport.

Basketball has been on the upswing for almost 2 decades now. Elite colleges recruit more for your talent in tennis, crew, or soccer than football. These changes don’t mean anything more significant other than the cultural attention span is always inherently limited.

“Voluntary games of tackle football are even rarer. I’ve walked past dozens or hundreds of games in a nearby town park–all baseball, soccer, or hockey. Never football, even touch football. From my own youth, I remember lots of enthusiastically voluntary hockey games, not to mention baseball, basketball, and handball, but football wasn’t much seen outside of phys ed class or Boy Scouts. ”

I grew up in Green Bay, and I am a bit older than you. I remember playing some sandlot football as a kid, but it was mostly a bunch of 10-11 year olds tossing a football around and running into each other, until a rules dispute or someone getting hurt took place. By the time a guy hits puberty, you cannot play tackle without some injury without investing in some fairly expensive equipment. These expenses are not required for basketball or soccer, and the continuous action compared to the chess like move and pause of football lessens the need for non-playing planners and arbiters.

As a naturalized citizen I tried hard to like America’s game.
I could not get past the fact that game actually stopped most of the time.(I read somewhere the actual game is played about 11 min which lasts 3 hours on TV!). Then there is a bigness issue: there seem about hundred huge freaks of nature players, some on the pitch and some just hanging on the side. Then there are dozens of big coaches with huge headsets chewing large piece of gum. Then, as everything must be big, the game is analyzed on TV by huge commentators wearing XXXL clothes. Game starts ..and there is pile up ..and repeat.

particpation vs. viewing. NFL and college football sells lots of tickets and airtime (not to mention merchandise), but not too much participation – especially if you have to go to a regular job on Monday morning sans cast or crutches. Lots of adult soccer, basketball, softball leagues – but not many football ones. As mentioned above, by participation, baseball and soccer are much better because no particular “freak of nature” attributes are needed (height obviously helps in basketball), no expensive equipment, and just about anyone can play (if not play well). Soccer does require at least being in decent shape to keep up, and skill is required to play well. Baseball requires a reasonable amount of eye-hand coordination. But neither requires you to be able to bench >300#. Don’t get me wrong, football’s a great sport to watch others play (all the breaks give you plenty of time to get another beer from the fridge), but it is not likely to be much of a participatory sport for a long stretch of your life. Soccer, baseball and basketball can be played reasonably into your fifties, and for some, beyond that.

Wasn’t baseball the sport of America in it ascendancy (late 1800’s to 1945) and at its peak (1945-1960), and football more the sport of its relative decline thereafter (1960 to present)? If we are looking for metaphors and the like, isn’t baseball more sorta like the Olympics, and football more like Coliseum gladiatorial spectacles (republican virtue in a game of skill versus violent imperial excess and spectacle)?

And, yeah, national “greatness” is hardly demonstrated by being the best at a sport no one else plays. Besides being good at a sport, a country shows cultural dominance generally by being the creator of a sport that has succeeded internationally. For the USA, that means baseball (popular in parts of Latin America and East Asia) and volleyball and basketball (popular more or less worldwide). The UK is still the leader, with soccer, rugby, golf, curling, cricket, etc. France has tennis and bicycle racing. And so on. But creating and excelling at a sport that no one else outside your country cares about is really no big deal.

And don’t be misled by the claims that so and so many hundreds of millions of folks outside the USA are watching the Super Bowl, because they are not. Such numbers are always compiled on the basis of how many people could theoretically be watching, as in the game is on TV where they live. But that doesn’t mean they ARE watching. For TV audiences, there really is nothing like the soccer World Cup. It is quite possible that more than one in six human beings on the entire planet watch the final game live on TV.

I agree with the all the other posters. Football is not a good game to play, for amateurs. For professionals, besides the concussion issue, there is the orthopedic and other damage. Great soccer players, like Pele, looked like they were fit and healthy late into life, while their contemporaries from American football, like Joe Namath and Johnny Unitas, looked like they couldn’t walk up a flight of stairs.

Why would any parent, whose kid had options other than pro sports, want his kid to play football? Most don’t. And, no, that is not because of any “liberal” conspiracy. The game is dangerous, period. And most responsible parents recognize that on their own. There is a big difference between a parent being reluctant to enroll their kid in youth football and a “helicopter parent” generally. Sure, there are risks in everything, and parents can’t wrap their kids up in that bubble packing stuff for eighteen years. But they shouldn’t just obliviously ignore risks either.

And even if your kid does have pro sports as his best or only option, basketball and baseball promise longer careers with fewer debilitating injuries.

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy watching football as a spectator sport, but I fail to see why its continued or permanent ascendancy is something I should be concerned about preserving.

I went into each of those activities with my eyes wide open. Injuries are part of the sport. The contact of football like boxing of repeated punching should have come as no surprise to owners or players.

I don’t know if the sport is on the way out. I bowed out of the professional sports arena when athletes were spouting off about Iraq, but gave nothing more than than spouting.

But i doubt it is on the wane anytime soon. WWF has paved the way for the strange caged fights once viewed as film noir in martial arts productions. But I doubt it will replace football . . .

Last week, I saw ads for arm wrestling on AMC of all places, but I doubt that will replace football either.

The only way for football to lose footing is if it is hit by some overwhelming scandal, but given the high threshhold of what constitutes scandal — doubtful: steroids — it is doubtful that there are any seriously real benefit from them and in football decidedly more brutal than baseball — it will hardly register.

One other thing about football — they are not complacent about the various threats to their of the market and are more astute than baseball leagues — controversy is all part of good campaigning.

The diversification of television may dent it a bit — but college rivalries remain as the prep fields for that day when some once forbidden svelt woman stands in a locker room full of rippling muscles and sweat asking questions cloaked in the oldest sales technique in the book —

When you get old enough and one day actually attend a high school reunion, you will finally be able to stand and look at the proof of what intelligent students knew all along. The president of the chess team and the skinny kid who wrote the joke column are standing there being flirting with by all the well-preserved ladies, who now out number still-functioning men four to one. All the athletes are clutching their walkers or slumped over drooling in their wheel chairs while those of us who thought that anybody over ten still playing children’s games were morons are still active and enjoying life. Sports are great for keeping the stupid aggressive boys busy for a few years, and for banging them up enough to make them less dangerous, but for adults or society at large to give over billions and massive attention to such games is ludicrous, chariot races for the decadent. But, all through life avoiding the sports nuts is a great way to always chose the more interesting conversation, leading to a much richer intellectual and social life.

I too played tackle football in sandlots as a pre-teen and teen with no protective gear. Growing up in south Florida, any well worn lot by kids playing tackle football turned into sand pretty quickly. So at least the ground impact was less, and because of the loose sand, the speed we could run was less, ergo the impacts were less violent.

The exposition on Max Boot’s plagiarism is not shocking and even expected, but is still disturbing.

In America’s case, Karl Marx was wrong. Religion in not the opiate of the masses, pro sports is. Nothing but a complete weapon of mass distraction to divert their attention away from this country’s rampant economic failure, unemployment, failed imperialistic overseas wars, failed immigration policy and growing police state tyranny at home. And the disgusting, jingoistic displays of warmongering and military worship prior to the game,the sickening debauchery of the half-time show and equally dispicable TV commercials has been enough for me to not only refuse to watch the Stupid Bowl but all 1%-owned and promoted professional “sports”. I hope it all just implodes from all of its degeneracy.

Not one more red cent of taxpayer money should go to build stadiums for billionaires to have their teams play other teams of billionaires. Not only do they rip off tax dollars to build their stinking stadiums, they charge outrageous prices that regular people could never justify paying in a million years, so only the wealthy get to actually use the stadiums. It would be a great day in America if football died.

The whole point of football is for young men to test their mettle and to toughen up. That is why football was mostly a college and high school game until after WWII. Just look at the facts. The game is too rough for women and older men and requires a depth of strategy and level of organization that most sports lack.

Football is like war and that’s how football players treat it. Practice is like boot camp and on the field you try to kill your opponent. (It’s a perfect segue from high school to the military.) Each play is beautiful coordinated violence; each player has his part, like a dancer in a ballet.How can anything compare to knocking into a lineman at full-speed and running through and over him to sack the quarterback? The typical American kid thinks this way and most never really outgrow it.

Sure sports like soccer are okay, but they just lack football’s oomph. Unless rugby catches on, football is not going anywhere. Neither are wrestling, hunting, or weightlifting. Any risks involved are far outweighed by the prospect of turning American boys into men.

“Any risks involved are far outweighed by the prospect of turning American boys into men.”

Because, naturally, the effete soccer-playing Germans who nearly conquered the world twice militarily and are in the process of taking over all of Europe economically are a nation of lilly-livered boys, because they do not go through “boot camp”.

What utter hooey.

You want to know why kids don’t play football, but a lot of men watch it? Two simple reasons. First, as everyone above has pointed out, pretty much everyone can play soccer pretty much everywhere. I sat next to the captain of the high school football team in English class in grade 12. I’m about 6 and weighed about 140 pounds back then – he was half a foot taller and literally twice as heavy. You bet your bottom dollar I would be playing soccer. I did not need to know about CTE, only basic Newtonian physics. Second, those who actually play a sport know exactly what is involved in, er, playing it. So while we can say WTF when a player screws up, it is far more difficult to be a Monday morning quarterbacker: we know the challenges of playing well. Most football watchers have no clue, because very few actually get on a pitch; it’s a lot easier to criticise and strategise when you have no idea what you are talking about.

The comments are far more insightful than the post. The only thing truly American in the NFL is the fact that deeply corrupt corporate cronyism (exemption from anti-trust rules, endless government handouts) is paraded as the epitome of capitalist American virtue, because Boy Into Men, and soccer is portrayed as some sort of east coast elitism, because France. Curious, but there you have it.

George Will said it best: “Football combines two of the worst things in American life. It is violence punctuated by committee meetings.”

And I’m sorry, but this article is a bit dumb. I thought it was going to be about CTE, and the dangers the sport (its high-level tackle versions, at least) poses to its participants–and the threat to the sport in return. That would be an interesting article to write, given that American football has been there before, and survived (though the game was changed forever with the abolition of wedge formations, pre-snap motion by offensive linemen, and the forward pass).

But this? A soplistic rant about how American is too girly-man to appreciate football these days. I’m sure some Roman two millenia ago somewhere said something similar about circuses and gladiators.

And I say this as someone who enjoys the game as a spectator, and will be tuning into to the Super Bowl in about an hour’s time.

Football will endure because it is the only sport that is better on TV than in real life. And because it has an awesome and terrible beauty. Think of medieval jousting contests. We can’t have people dress up in armour and run at each other on horseback waving swords, or throw Christians to the lions anymore–think of the paperwork–but we can pay underprivileged young men to put on plastic armour and hurl their bodies at each other in ritualized destruction.

I think it’s weird how football is losing participants when it’s such a low skill game. Almost anyone can play it effectively with barely any teaching/coaching required. Compared to baseball, basketball, hockey or soccer, one’s success in football is far more likely to come from some natural athletic ability – or just being very fat and tall – than ten thousand hours of practice.

Rather, maybe that’s why it holds such sway over American TV habits. America loves the everyman, and loves to see the sun shine on the everyman’s ass once in a while – football is a place where you can see that happen.

I find it curious that people draw so much attention to the possible dangers of playing football. While I have never played, I’ve played rugby which has no pads; football seems tame by comparison. Maybe rugby will catch on since it does not require as much expensive equipment.